PHYSICAL OCEANOGRAPHY OF THE GULF OF MAINE 869 



Scotian shore at the mouth of the bay, or inward to Digby Gut, tended to drift 

 eastward, hugging the southern coast. Those set afloat more than 5 to 10 miles out 

 from land in the southern side of the bay rarely stranded on that shore, but usually 

 drifted northward across the bay to the New Brunswick shore. It is evident that 

 they did not go far up the bay, for only one bottle was picked up east of St. John, 

 while most of the recoveries of bottles set out on the Nova Scotian end of the inner- 

 most line were west of the longitude at which they were set out. 



Bottles set out in the northern side of the Bay of Fundy showed a westerly 

 drift, the majority of recoveries coming from the New Brunswick shore west of 

 Point Lepreau (especially concentrated in the region of Passamaquoddy Bay), with 

 some from the southern and eastern sides of Grand Manan. 



The southern edge of the inflowing current in the southern side of the bay 

 hugged the shore — witness the stranding of bottles along Nova Scotia. Its outer 

 (offshore) edge, on the contrary, showed as evident a tendency to veer, anticlock- 

 wise, across the bay toward the New Brunswick shore, and so to eddy westward, 

 made evident by the tendency of bottles from the Nova Scotia side to strand farthest 

 east (inward), along New Brunswick, and for bottles set out in the northern side of 

 the bay to follow the coast line of New Brunswick farther to the westward. 



Some idea of the routes followed by bottles crossing from the Nova Scotian to 

 the New Brunswick side of the bay can be gained from the relative lengths of the 

 intervals between release and recovery,'* when these prove as consistent as they did in 

 this instance. Mavor (1922, p. 116) has already commented on the fact that the 

 bottles set out on the Nova Scotian end of a line abreast of Point Lepreau (his line G) 

 averaged longer afloat than those set out on the New Brunswick end, suggesting 

 that they took a longer route, going up on the Nova Scotian side and down on the 

 New Brunswick side. The time intervals between release and recovery for bottles 

 drifting from Nova Scotia to New Brunswick were also longer for those set out near- 

 est the mouth of the bay (25 to 48 days) than for those set adrift farther in the bay 

 (8 to 22 days), with a discrepancy much wider than the varying width of the bay 

 would account for. Bottles set out on the southern end of the innermost line and 

 picked up eight days later on the New Brunswick side must have followed a com- 

 paratively direct route in their crossing. A longer time interval for bottles set out 

 nearer the mouth of the bay points to a more extended circling drift; but the fact 

 that on the whole bottles set out farther and farther east along the Nova Scotian 

 side fetched up farther and farther up the bay in the New Brunswick side is evidence 

 that the south-north drift was of considerable breadth. 



A cross section of the Bay of Fundy from Nova Scotia to Grand Manan would 

 thus have shown a rather sudden transition, at the time, from a current flowing 

 toward the southwest in the northern side to a northeast drift in along the southern 

 shore. The fates of four bottles that were set out close together on a line abreast 

 of Point Lepreau, but were picked up far apart and on opposite sides of the bay 37 

 to 70 days later, locates the boundary of these two currents nearer Nova Scotia than 

 New Brunswick (Mavor, 1922, p. 116). 



8< Always remembering that a bottle may lie a long time on some seldom-visited beach. 

 37755—27 24 



